Chiral Creations

A toddler may jam their left foot into their right shoe but they soon learn that doesn’t work, because our feet are mirror images of each other. Our cells and molecules have ‘handedness’ too, a property called chirality. Here, researchers investigate how molecule chirality influences cell chirality to figure out its emergence in tissues. Single cells put on a substrate and then viewed from above with a microscope, were in a spin internally – their nucleus and cytoplasm displayed chiral behaviour, rotating clockwise. Fluorescently tagging the cell’s inner scaffold of proteins (cytoskeleton) revealed a vortex-like chiral pattern of fibres at the cell’s bottom (on the substrate) edges (pictured, left) with a concentric pattern (right) at the cell top (dorsal side). The team discovered it’s the chirality of a molecule called myosin of the dorsal concentric filaments that’s inducing the cell’s chiral rotation. So, cell-scale behaviour results from chiral molecules not cell-scale chirality.

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Takaki Yamamoto and colleagues
• RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Japan
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife, July 2025